Installing xserver
I installed a woody base system and then install the xserver-svga
required by my nVidia GeForce3 card and a window manager. Then from a
root command line I ran startx. However, all I got as a result was a
black screen with speckles (not x's grey screen), with a set of
blinking underlines. My guess is I was looking at a brief paragraph or
sentence followed by a cursor, that recycled and lacked a proper
horizontal sync.
I took a look at the /ect/X11/XF86Config file, and to my eyes it was
very strange. In part perhaps because I'm familiar with the RedHat
file, but there were suspicious aspects.
My current configuration has a vertRefresh of 48-120 Hz, but the
debian file ends up with 50-85Hz. I used "medium" level configuration,
which asked me for the "best" performance of my card. I entered
1792x1344@75 (my card is capable of 1800x1440@120 Hz), which was
closest. And so why did the configuration reduce the horizontal
refresh so drastically?
Other oddities. Nowhere in the device section or elsewhere does the
configuration see my nVidia card and what should be its its nv
driver. Instead, the graphic card's name is generic and the driver is
simply VGA2. I assumed that the nv driver was compiled in the stock
2.4.18-bf2.4 kernel. Am I wrong? How would I know?
In the monitor section, there are three dozen commented lines
describing all possible resolutions and refresh rates, and associated
with each is an uncommented line with a "ModeLine" statement. Is this
enormous mess normal in debian?
Did I fail to install a needed package? Shouldn't my video card have
been detected? Should I expect the debian xserver configuration to be
close enough to the RedHat so that I can use one to some extent as a
model for changing the other?
--
Haines Brown
brownh@hartford-hwp.com
kb1grm@arrl.net
www.hartford-hwp.com
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